The Age of Arrogance

It will take a long while and the insights of many people to understand the forces at play in the precipitate falls from grace of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and others. Since these men exhibited more than a touch of arrogance when they were on high, I feel obliged to offer a few thoughts, in two columns. This one deals with those who were on camera. The next will look at those who had sway the behind-the-scenes.

It will take a long while and the insights of many people to understand the forces at play in the precipitate falls from grace of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and others. Since these men exhibited more than a touch of arrogance when they were on high, I feel obliged to offer a few thoughts, in two columns. This one deals with those who were on camera. The next will look at those who had sway the behind-the-scenes.

Arrogance and ignorance are, the adage says, a fatal combination. But what does it mean to be ignorant? An answer jumps out of the responses to a recent, annual Constitution Day civics survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The Center queried 1,000 American male and female adults -— the usual size of a survey sample, providing a margin of error of less than 3.7 percent — and found many appalling things.

In an age in which arrogance is accepted as standard behavior rather than rejected as excessive, hubris has vanished. Originally a Greek term for a fatal character flaw, usually of overweening pride, hubris was a sin against the gods, and usually led to tragic actions, a downfall due to over-reaching, and often to death.

All democratically elected presidents lie to the public now and then, some more frequently than others. But all autocratic leaders lie to the public all the time and every time, believing that telling the truth never benefits them.

Our Founding Fathers had a sense that truth and democracy were irrevocably intertwined, that embracing honesty and truthful communications to the public was at the heart of what they referred to as republicanism.

Imagine a continuum of pride, with extreme arrogance at one end and abject humility at the other. I’ll be examining this continuum in this and the next several columns.

As examples of arrogance proliferate, the continuum is being continually extended further in that direction. But the other end, that of humility, is shrinking, as examples of abject humility become harder to find — humility is out of fashion, and those who aspire to humility don’t trumpet it.